[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness. Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and optimal HRV. Check us
[email protected] please enjoy the show.
Welcome, friends to the Heart Rate Variability podcast. I am so excited about our guest today. I have read his recent book, the Pulse Cure, and if you're listening this podcast, so should you. It's one of those books we were talking a little bit before is sometimes I read these books and I'm like, oh, I hope the author mentions heart rate variability. It would fit in so good here. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So Torgal's book on heart rate variability and his use both personally and professionally, I thought was just a brilliant addition for us HRV nerds out there that really want to see more focused on this topic. So I am really excited to have this conversation. Torkel, welcome to the show. Love for you to just do a brief introduction of yourself to our guests and then I can't wait to nerd out with you about heart rate variability.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you Matt. And so happy to be here or your podcast because I've been listening to your podcast at least 50 episodes or more through the three years.
You're kind of HRV hero, one of the pioneers. So I'm particularly happy.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: Hey, I'll take that on a Monday. I'll take.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Well, I'm to introduce myself a bit. My name is Torkel, I'm a norwegian doctor, MD, general practitioner, a lot of emergency medicine and well, this book I wrote, it was released in Norway one year ago and it was released in the UK in January and will be released mid May as a paperback in the US.
Well, I've been working all over the country in Norway for 25 years, seen maybe more than 50,000 unique different patients. And well, I have a clear picture of what makes you sick and what makes you healthy. And I'm more interested in keeping people healthy or avoid getting sick. And the pulse here is really a book about the different strategies that you need to implement to avoid getting sick. And as we can now use the wearables like aura ring Garmin watches and WHOOP bands and all these different devices, it's so much easier to do what is right because the lifestyle that is good for us is also measurable in heart rate variability.
Of course, you already know. I don't need to tell you that.
So it's actually, to my knowledge, at least when we wrote the book, it's the first guidebook on how to use HRV to guide your lifestyle changes.
I did not find anyone else. If you know some, please tell me, because I would love to read them.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: I would too, by the way.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's really a surprise that I am the one writing this book and not a professor or a PhD or some high ranking medical person. I'm just a normal doctor.
As normal doctor as you can get it.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Yeah. But I saw that there was a need to tell about this information because I used it solely for my own benefit, and my publisher saw that I was doing this. I'd written a book for them earlier called the Camera Cure, about how to use photography to improve your coping skill or mastery. And they saw that I was doing these measurements and just asked, is this a book for us? And then I thought, okay, yeah, maybe.
Now it has been on the bestseller list in Norway for 64 straight weeks.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Congratulations.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you.
So it's already translated into Danish and Swedish and polish and Dutch and, of course, English. So it's kind of a miracle, really.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Well, you've given a gift to the world. And one of the things I really liked about how you wrote the book was it kind of mixed in throughout. I thought you did a good job of weaving it kind of in and out throughout the book is your personal journey with heart rate variability as well. And I would love to, as someone, obviously, as a medical practitioner, thinking about health, being highly educated on health, I'd love for you to share just a little bit about when did HRV come onto your radar and how did it change your thinking about yourself and your own health and wellness?
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Well, my health journey started, like, five years before I became aware of the HRV. My father died at the age of 73. And then I realized that, okay, I want to live longer than that and have so much to do. So I started changing my lifestyle because when we were in medical school, we did not really learn anything about lifestyle and the importance of it, other than not smoking, of course.
And then I became aware of the knowledge about how to live better and for longevity and health. There was so much more information, and I had done everything wrong. I was drinking too much. I was smoking. I was 40 pounds more heavy than I'm now. I did not exercise. I did not care at all what I was eating. I was cutting sleep I did everything wrong, basically. That's what I found out. So I just had to turn everything around. And five or six years ago, I became aware of that there is such a thing called HRV and the autonomic nervous system and the importance of it. And then I was just hooked. And then I started using ECG based devices, like first speed devices and different kind of devices. And I thought that I was not stressed because I had heard about the sympathetic nervous system as fight, flight and freeze, and I was never scared. So I thought I must be in the parasympathetic mode all the time.
Of course I wasn't.
And the last five years has really been surprises, and surprises and surprises all along about what really affects the nervous system and affects the stress level. So it has been very interesting. So it's been like an adventure into our own nervous system and discovering things that is coming to a new continent and being the first one there, you probably have the same.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: That go into a new continent, because the other thing that's really weaved in and out there with your personal story is how you started to integrate this into your medical practice, and something that, you know, at least in the US medical system, we almost want you to be sick before we see you.
That doesn't represent what, especially guests of this podcast, how they look at health and wellness, but it's kind of the model we've set up here.
So I'm wondering, as you start introducing the concept of heart rate variability, I love how you would look at people's wrists to see what watches they were wearing. Just sort of, how did you start to introduce that to folks that your patients who may not have heard of it, how did that help you structure your wellness and health conversations with them?
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good question.
If I saw a patient with like a Garmin watch, that's a watch that I know the best, then I would ask them, can I see your phone? Can I check your app? I'll just have a look. And then usually, almost like a gypsy, you could probably tell something about their lifestyle for the last two or three weeks that they were surprised.
How could you know this? I could say that this day was hard, and I guess you were drinking that day or whatever. And so they would soon realize that, okay, there's some value in this, because in the Garmin washers and their body battery system, it sounds like something that Walt Disney would have invented, but it's a real strong algorithms made by first bit analytics, a finnish company.
And as soon as I could read their curves, their algorithms, then there's so much valuable information that could tell me something about their state that as a doctor, I would have no chance of knowing this without this device.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Absolutely.
So you have that you can show them sort of what's looking at their past week, kind of seeing that, and then how would you set them up to kind of move forward with this? So whether tracking just overall health and wellness, or if they were seeing you because of maybe contracting a disease or having maybe sort of worried about their health, how did you then kind of give them a 101 on, okay, how do you look at these scores in the morning? What do they tell you?
How do you integrate that in to your care?
[00:10:56] Speaker B: I would probably just show them a bit that the Garmin curves, the blue is a parasympathetic mode, and the orange is sympathetic mode. And just tell them that, okay, this is out of balance. You can see here that this is too much stress.
And what they can read on the app is warnings that these days are stressful. And then I could maybe point out to, okay, this day was fine, and this day was fine. What did you do here? And they would think back in, okay, I did this. Okay, a little bit more of that and less of this.
So, just in this simple way, just giving some obvious, easy advice, really.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: And I wonder, being a bestseller over in Norway, I'm assuming you're getting connected with other healthcare professionals, other wellness professionals. So I'm sort of wondering, how has the response been from peers in your field?
Because we're still in a space where you could have. I've met cardiologists who have not heard of heart rate variability yet, so there's a wide range of knowledge, and I would love to hear your experience, because I'm just fascinated with other medical systems know. I think they're all better than the US because of our enormous flaws that we have in our system. But just sort of, what have those conversations been like in Norway and beyond?
[00:12:31] Speaker B: Yeah, in Norway, there's a quite growing environment of younger doctors and nutritionists and physiotherapists and chiropractors and so on, that will know about these things. And they have taken it to heart immediately. And all my friends, everybody I know, use the Garmin watches and track their HRV, and then the old style, whatever to call it, doctors, they haven't even opened their eyes yet. They're not aware of anything. I'm embarrassed on their behalf, really.
They don't listen to podcasts. They don't listen to the updated information that is so widespread. I mean, you can't listen to any podcast like Mark Hyman or diary of a CEO, or feel better, live more, or all the other Hughman lab without hearing the exact same message. And they're just not listening. They're just doing their job 60 hours a week, and they're not really paying attention still and being very doubtful about it. They're thinking, like, I didn't hear this in medical school, like, 50 years ago, so it cannot be very important.
It's probably the same over at your place. And in Norway, health care is free, but in the US, then I know to get sick is really expensive.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: And the advice in the pulse cure, they're all lifestyle strategies that are free or even cheaper than the alternative.
It's much cheaper to be healthy than sick.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: And unfortunately, there's too much money in caring for sick patients, and it's too much money in having people sick for 30 years. So there's a kind of natural inclination to really wait until people get sick and then started treating them. And what is good about these devices is that there is money in preventative health care, in technology and in these apps and so on, to keep people healthy and not the least that they can be in charge of their own health. So with these devices, you are in charge. You can see the results of what you do, and if you get sick, the doctor is in charge, and you are in their hands. And really, with these devices, you have it literally in your own hands.
It's such a big shift in time.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Excellent. So I always like to ask authors this question, because I find when I love writing books, because I think about things maybe deeper, maybe just different ways of thinking. So I was just kind of wondering, as you were going through the writing process, were there any kind of epiphanies or surprises that sort of, as you were structuring your thoughts in this very succinct and practical and really well developed way, did anything kind of jump out or any epiphanies that you might have had during the writing process?
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah. The epiphanies came as I had to investigate more and deeper.
And to my surprise, the fasting was so relaxing to the HRV, so being hungry fasting for a day or two was so effective, and also that the cold was so effective, I didn't like that, because I didn't like getting cold as most people do.
I was usually not swimming anywhere, except for in the Mediterranean or in the Caribbean or in the.
So that the cold plunge and cold showers was so effective in keeping the heart rate down. That was a really big surprise. And also the fasting, that was a big surprise. And that now tomorrow I'm going out into the sea here with a friend.
The sauna and cold plunges is really taken on. And I hear also in the States.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Yeah, more and more, you'll see I'm right at the base of the Rocky Mountains, so we have a cold stream that comes out. I'll be honest, I'm just going to turn the shower on cold at the end and do that. But you see a lot of folks taking advantage of that. It's on my list. But I'm like you, I really don't like this. But then I measure my heart rate variability and I see, okay, my body really likes this. It's one of those things.
It's like this is cold, but afterwards and for hours later, I can just feel the benefits of that for hours later, hours later.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: So that's a big surprise, really.
Two minutes with the cold shower and that's enough. And you get used to it. And the worst part is the first 30 seconds and then your skin gets cold and then the last minute and a half is not too bad.
It's not comfortable, but everything that is helping us is getting a bit more back to nature and challenging our systems a bit more with exercise and temperatures and food so that it's not just like, okay, I'm hungry, I'm eating. It's to regain some of the control that we used to have 10,000 years ago. So often you can ask, okay, did people do this 10,000 years ago? And if that is yes, then it's probably good for you.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it's amazing. It seems so long ago, but in human history it wasn't that. We had a lot more evolution to take place before agriculture and everything kicked in.
With my background in psychology, the evolutionary biology or psychology is just fascinating. I think you can take it too far really quickly, as I see people do sometimes with eating and other things. But it's a really interesting way to look at our biology, our psychology, our social behaviors through that evolutionary perspective and then to kind of map this out of, okay, this is sort of why we think the brain and the nervous system is structured in these ways. And then plop that evolutionary biology and psychology in front of a Zoom camera that I'm talking to a new friend on the other side of, maybe not on the other side of the world, but thousands of miles away.
So it's just fascinating to drop that evolution into modern society. I wonder if there's any other things that you have seen with that, because you do speak, I think, really balanced in the book about looking at that evolutionary perspective, just any other insights you might have on that.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: Yeah, and we don't have to go all the way back and start bow and arrow and running around naked, but to get some of all the elements, get some sunshine, get some nature, accept to be cold, accept to be fasting, eat real food as little ultra processed as you can. So if you can do a little and sleep during the night and use the circadian rhythm to our advantage. So we have to play with our nervous system and our physiology and not against it as we usually do now. So it's just playing, knowing our biology and adapting to our natural biology as much as it's practical in our lives.
And of course, when you see it on the watches, on your HRV, it's so much more motivating to do that because it's often something that is uncomfortable to do. But when you do these uncomfortable things, it will be more uncomfortable because the most uncomfortable thing is being sick.
And people are sick from, they are like 55 and for like 2030 years. And that's really hard.
So you have to do something that's really a little bit hard every day, and you will profit from it for years to come.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Another thing I love about heart rate variability is if you do it, you can overdo it, too. And HRV will let you know just in case.
Like I said, I've got some friends that all of a sudden want to change everything about their life. It's like, let's pick one or two to start out this week and work your way up to it. You don't run a marathon, and if you've not been jogging right away, that kind of mentality that I think heart rate variability gets you kind of off the couch because it shows you the benefits of doing that. And yet we'll give you that little, like, hey, you may need a recovery day. Which when I was an athlete, we never talked about recovery, much less a recovery day.
You got to push yourself. Push yourself or you're just being lazy and hurting your.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: I know, I used to do kayaking. Yeah, I was on the national team, and we trained every day for like five years, and we trained always really hard. And even an easy day, even a day after a hard weekend of competitions, I'm sure Monday morning we were doing hard training, so we had no clue and I trained too much and had to quit because of that. I got some inflammation in my tendons and was not able to take it easy.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: It'S so much better to train with your HRV so that you can adapt and regulate and then you can train less and achieve more.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Absolutely. And that's the exciting thing about it as well, is that recovery, I try to use the word active recovery because I think people hear recovery and they're thinking about just like, it's not a productive thing, especially in the US with our, like, you know, a day not pushing myself to my absolute limit, I'm losing time. Right. And I'm trying to think, well, maybe you walk a couple, you know, just, you don't just sit and just watch tv all, you know, thinking about that, what you're eating that day, how you're sleeping, and really challenging people to think about that as part of your optimizing your overall, whether it's performance or just health, giving yourself those days to be gentle with yourself and see that as part of the journey as well.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: Yeah. And also you shouldn't do too much optimalization optimization because you want to live your life. So I'm very concerned about health normalization.
So instead of being sick, being healthy, and from there on to optimize your health, we don't even know what that is.
Because when I see patients that are well and like 94, 95 years old, I usually ask them, what have they done? They have not been training, they've just been doing natural things, living like in the blue zones.
They haven't done anything fancy, so they would just live quite naturally.
And so far, the ones who have been optimizing their health, I have not still seen kind of the results of it.
So I think that health normalization would be a good thing because you want to have enough health to live your life. You don't want to spend your whole day and night just thinking about health.
It's not the end in itself, it's just a means to live your life in an optimal life.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And what I love about you mentioned this, you talk about maybe a little different way than I do, but we're talking about the same thing about building those healthy habits, because I've just read books like yours over the years and implemented something, and then I just do it kind of every day, but I don't give myself credit for it. So also, looking at people's, what are they doing that's healthy already? And then trying to build those small habits on top of that, I think is so much better than, again, the mentality of, oh, I know, I wasn't doing anything for the last ten years. Of my life now I'm going full bore into being the healthiest person in the world kind of mentality, and that can be harmful for folks. And with motivation, obviously, it's nearly impossible to succeed on because a setback or two then leads you to just going back to the unhealthy stuff, which is counterproductive.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I totally agree.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: And also, you have your background in psychology, and I think that we have put too much emphasize on the psychology when often it's the physiology that is the problem. So if your physiology is out of whack, your thoughts are not right, and you can put that into words, but it doesn't need to be words that will correct it. So when you get your physiology straight, then the thoughts will be better as well. So I think that the physiology is much more important in many cases than the psychology and how we can talk our way out to problems. Often we can train or relax and balance our way out to the problems. I think.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I think this is the one thing in your book, and again, because when my hammer looks like mental health, everything and nail, I want to hit with that mental health hammer, because I don't disagree with you. I think that there's this integration piece, which is so important with the background in mental health and have been a therapist and in different roles in my career, is that I look at things like sleep, nutrition, movement. Really, if I don't talk about that with my patients or my clients, there's a ceiling on how much I can help folks. I can still help them, because especially if there's trauma or other things, negative thought patterns or anxiety, we've got tools to do that. But if I don't help that autonomic nervous system regulate, you're almost working against me. And that's where I think we agree. What you said in the book, like 100% is looking at that autonomic nervous system, and those wellness aspects are going to have that impact on psychology as well. Maybe. I think where we might differ a little bit is, I think, to do that at the same time with a mental health professional who actually knows this research, which we're getting there, maybe quicker than some of those doctors you mentioned do. The polyvagal theory and the neurobiology parts, is that if you're struggling with mental health issues, again, working on both of those together, I think is where you get the bang for the buck. Then, our friend. Heart rate variability is a metric of your body's ability to handle or recover from physical or psychological or medical or social stress.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I totally agree. And the first place that I heard HRV mentioned was in the book the body keeps the score by Besselfunder Kolk. So that was the first place really. And that he was saying that they will use HRV to see if the patient can receive psychotherapy, because if the HRV is too low, they will not be in the position to take advantage of it. So they would wait or time it better so that the HRV was better and then they could talk. So absolutely, both things are very important. But I heard like the other day, some guy came or called me and he said that he had stopped in Norway. We use a kind of a tobacco that you put under our lip.
25% of the population do that. It's not common in the States. But once he stopped that, his heart rate went from 80 to 59 and his anxiety vanished.
When your pulse is high, it's like the brain interprets it as something, anxiety. Something is the trouble.
It's so interesting.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
I'm a big student of history and I love that everything was philosophy at one point. And I think while specialization is needed in a modern society, because everything is so complex that what we're learning about, whether it's astronomy, astrology, whatever, or whether it's biology, nervous system, everything's so complex, you need that specialization. But I think we lose the holistic piece of that. Whereas if your autonomic nervous system is dysregulated, your thought patterns are going to dysregulated, your social relationships are going to be dysregulated, and your thinking is going to be all those pieces. And looking at if we remove psychology as something that's around whatever human consciousness turns out to be, but it's something kind of separate from biology, then I think we're doing both systems a huge disservice. That's where that biopsychosocial approach, to me, while it's kind of dated now, it's still just so relevant to should be our thinking to look at all these different aspects, because the health of your relationship is going to impact your heart rate variability, your nervous system, your thought process is going do that as well as that nervous system impacting those, the other direction as well. And you don't always need a chicken and the egg. It can be an integrated system if you put pieces back together.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a trouble in Norway, and probably in the states as well, that the psychiatrist is separated from the normal hospitals and the normal doctors. So it's like a wall between, I don't know what they call it the somatic doctors or the normal doctors. They know very little about psychiatry and the other way around, and it's all connected, so there should be much more knowledge on both sides, I think, about the connection between everything.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Well, our friend HRV gives us, I really believe a language in your book does this. That's where I think it's such a gift to the world, is what you're trying to do. What I'm trying to do is create a shared language where if we're sitting in a room, multidisciplinary team from different perspectives, we've got a shared understanding of what's going to drive outcomes in pretty much any medical condition or the mental health condition. Social condition, like heart rate variability, can give you an insight. Again, you might want to run a whole bunch of other labs, depending on what you're talking about, but at the same time, that heart rate variability needs to be part of those vital signs and lab results to tell us, are we being effective?
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah, and absolutely. And the fact that you have it on your arm at your disposal anytime, for example, that the women and the menstrual cycle, that you can see that the week before menstruation is a physiological stress. That's a big load on the system. And you cannot do the same job or train, or put the same amount of stress in your life this week before menstruation as you can in the other.
And the result is, I see it because we have a social website called thepulsker.com in Norway. It's the pulsecreen, or the translation of it, and we have 4000 members.
So I get to see so many algorithms, so many curves, and I can see that the week before menstruation is as hard as the COVID Wow. It's more or less the same amount of physiological load, and it's like the women have like a COVID once a week, every month. And it's not just mood, or it's not just frustration that you are annoyed or irritated, but it's a physiological load on your system that is very visible.
It's like having a speedometer on your wrist, so you can see the load on your system at each moment, and then you can try to be like a detective of your own autonomic nervous system and see, what is this?
What is this load coming from? Was it the alcohol yesterday? Or was it the food?
So many people find that there are certain foods they don't tolerate, like gluten or flour based foods at all.
Ultra processed food.
For my sake, I tolerate chili very badly. So if I eat the meal with chili the whole night, it's just stressful.
[00:36:03] Speaker A: Evolutionarily. I don't know if your ancestors were that exposed to chilies.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: And also that is so individual. It will tell you. How do you react to this?
Because what I see also because all my friends have Garmin watches, so I can see that when we do the same thing, we respond to it differently.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:27] Speaker B: So although some RCT research could show that, okay, the average is like this, it doesn't matter because you may be an outlier or be in the opposite side of the scale.
[00:36:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Also, very important thing is it shows how you react to a certain stressor.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Love it. So I usually ask authors to think about the future, and I'm going to ask you that question too. But I'm interested because you offer kind of a unique opportunity.
You probably finished writing the book a couple of years ago now or a year and a half.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Yeah, a year and a half.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: Give me an update, because I just got your thinking up to a year and a half ago. So I just kind of wonder. I'm assuming HRV is becoming more and more a part of your profession, your thinking, it hasn't probably gone away. So I just kind of like, give me an update after finishing the book, like last week.
What's new? What would be the new appendix if you were to write one about the last year and a half?
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
So before I wrote the book, everybody thought that, what's this weird guy doing measuring his pulse?
He must be a lunatic or a really weirdo.
But now the whole country does this.
It is strange, really.
There's something about the pulse and the heart rate variability and the pulse cure in the newspapers every week.
[00:38:08] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: And before the book is released, nothing.
So it has really changed the way a lot of people look at their health. So if the same thing happens in the States in a short time, because it's so easy to understand, it's fun. It's like a gamification of yourself.
So there has been such a change just for this last year after the book has been out that it's hardly conceivable.
And I think the same thing will happen in the US. Garmin is an american product, it's an american watch, and you have WHOOP.
And there's so many things happening now. So I think this is happening so fast. So just in a couple of years, two, three, four or five years, HRV will be something that everybody knows. Everybody knows their speed.
HRV is like your physiological speed and it will be meaningless not to know it in just a few years, I'm sure.
[00:39:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
And I'd love to get from the medical side of things.
There is, I think, an interesting, because Apple Watch, and I'll just say I won't take a stand on it, but if you look at HRV, Twitter, there's not a whole lot of fans of the Apple Watch, but it's getting so, you know, I look out and if I'm doing a training or talking to an audience, there are so many like, apple watches are probably the most popular over here. So we're getting those. But very few people with an Apple Watch really know what heart rate variability is, much less what I'm saying about SDNN and Apple measures it. They don't care about that because they don't even know what I'm talking about. But it is that thing. And then how do we talk about it scientifically? Because also it's a very easy thing to get to take off and use it for your own purposes. As I like to kind of say of this works for everybody because it worked for me. It's like no heart rate variability is so amazing because, yeah, we can do population, we can do control group studies, but it's so individualized that I'm hoping books like yours really help to educate the conversations moving forward because it can get pretty pop culture and watered down pretty easy.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we'll be very well known in a few years. And with Apple Watch, I think they have to turn around pretty quickly because now Samsung is coming with their Galaxy ring. You probably, and if that is as good as the aura ring, which it probably is, then Apple will be in big trouble.
So they need to invent something really fast.
But on the Apple Watch, I think that one app that is not too bad, to put it that way, is the athletic app. It seems to have something to it.
Not anywhere near the Garmin or aura or.
But it's a lot better than nothing.
That is the alternative.
But I think Apple will have to up their.
[00:41:40] Speaker A: Mean. They do have, I think, hundreds of billions of dollars in the mean. I think you got us too. If they're interested in some consultant work, I think they should reach out to us.
I think they have the money to afford our fees. Let's put it that way.
When you look into the future, is there anything else that you are excited about, wondering about, worried about? I love to wrap up on this question of just looking forward and what do you see, what do you feel about the future besides it spreading hopefully like wildfire.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Yeah. I think in the future there will be much more focus on rest.
So that seems to be the problem. And I'm currently writing the book now on rest. I'm kind of extending the chapter, the 1015 pages in the post cure about rest and just making it to a book, just putting the magnifying glass on it. And it seems also that rest is not just something that you down time with no use rested state is very productive. The most productive people are very good at resting and using the default mode network in the brain and the good idea. So it's kind of like when nothing happens, that's when everything can happen.
So I think that there'll be much more focus on rest instead of being on all the.
So.
So that is something I hope will happen. It has to. So. Because if you don't find time for rest and recovery, you'll burn out. And I'm not sure how it is in the states, but burnout is so common in Norway.
People are like, crashing from 25 year old and 35 year old young people.
And they are the ones that are most happy about the pulse cure book and the devices because it gives them a possibility to regulate their systems. Because the ones who are most prone to get into a fatigue situation are also the ones who are not very good at listening to their own bodies. So when they get these signals and the watch can tell them that, okay, you're in overdrive here, you need to relax. Then it's almost, for them, it's almost a relief because there's somebody else telling them that you have the license to rest and they get a bad conscience of not working hard and so on.
I think particularly the most important thing about these watches and these devices is that we keep these very productive people running.
[00:44:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:39] Speaker B: Because if they get sick, it's not only that we have to use a lot of money for them and that they are not able to do their work, but if they had their system imbalanced, they would be able to do a lot of good work. But they're just having such a high physiological and mental speed that is not sustainable over time. So they just crash and then they spend years trying to get back.
[00:45:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:07] Speaker B: I'm not sure if you see the same thing.
[00:45:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: Do you see the same thing in the states?
[00:45:13] Speaker A: It's a public health issue at this point. Yeah. Gallup, who does really good surveys in the organizational arena, they said 59% of our workforce is currently burned out.
They do the best research, I believe, organizationally that I've seen so if you think about a medical practice, granted, not everybody might be working, but if you think about that, everybody who's employed that walks into your practice, there's a 60% chance that that person is going to be. Their stress burden, their alastolic load is at an unhealthy level.
We need to assess and help desperately.
If 60% of people are walking in with COVID we would help them. So it's like, I'm trying to put this on the radar. And the problem here in the states at least, is who are the most burned out people are physicians, providers, and nurses in the healthcare arena. So asking a bunch of burnout people to be aware of burned out people, that's scary.
So our healthcare system is getting it both of the mental health crisis. But then there's the biggest, as I use this analogy in my training for healthcare providers, you pack a football stadium with people, random people from your community, and you've got mental health resources, and all you know is about their occupation. You would call the nurses and physicians and healthcare workers up first. And that's pathetic, that's not sustainable. So on both sides of the equation is we've got burned out people walking into clinics with dysregulated nervous systems, and they're getting treated by professionals who have extreme dysregulated.
[00:47:09] Speaker B: Extremely. Absolutely.
[00:47:12] Speaker A: Where's healing happen, my friend?
[00:47:17] Speaker B: Because the body has its own healing system developed through millions of years, as long as you give it time and the recovery to be able to do its job.
And I'm sure that you would never get into a state of fatigue without the watches or rings really warning you, just blinking red that you're overstressed.
You need to relax.
That's maybe the most important thing that for most people, it's something that keeps you on the road, but at least it doesn't make you fall down a cliff.
It's kind of a guardrail, these watches. It's kind of a guardrail to avoid that, you just run over a cliff and end up in the bottom there and have a long way to get up.
[00:48:13] Speaker A: Well, and I think too, it gives you like a street sign further back, know, be careful. That's where I think heart rate variability, like in my own.
See if my seven day average is about what we kind of settled around for. The heartbeat of business that I wrote with Ema and Dave Hopper is like, you see a 15% drop in your seven day average versus your all time.
It's like just a warning sign. It's like that, hey, there's a steep curve coming up here. Beware. So hopefully you can take action before you maybe even need the guardrail. That would be, I think, using your great analogy, like, okay, I'm seeing this drop. What's going on here? Maybe I got a cold. Maybe I'm training for a half marathon. There could be other answers. But if I don't have any other clear answers, okay, I'm seeing this. And then I encourage people to have, like, what's your quick plan to do something fun on the weekends, to take an extra day off, but have that plan ahead of time to say, okay, when we see this drop, what can I do to not go any further?
And I think HRV gives you a brilliant early warning sign when it comes.
[00:49:37] Speaker B: Absolutely. And also, in addition to that, something that's very practical for us doctors is that after an infection, if you get the flu or COVID or pneumonia, or after an operation, after surgery, I'm surprised to see how long time even a small, minor surgery will result in so long recovery time.
A lot longer. You would think that I should be ready in five days. No way. It can take three weeks. So then we can see. Okay, when can you go back to work? When can you go back to do exercise and compared to your HRV?
[00:50:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:17] Speaker B: So for us doctors, it's so incredibly useful tool.
And as I said, the most important is that the patients have it on the wrist and hopefully even avoid getting to be patients.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Yeah. That is the think, like I said, and I appreciate it. I want to thank you for the pulse cure. Let me get the whole name here. The revolutionary new way to balance stress, optimize health, live longer. I've got the pre sale is on Amazon right now, the release date here in the US. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm seeing May 14. May 14 that's coming out. So I'm really excited to get that out to folks.
I need you to promise me, as you're getting ready to publish the book on recovery, that you reach back out, if not sooner, because I want to really nerd out with you about that. And I'm excited to see how that 15 pages expands, because I think that's such a crucial issue. And what a great follow up to the pulse cure. I think that'll be another great gift you give the world.
[00:51:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I'd love to be back talking to you, Matt. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
[00:51:32] Speaker A: Absolutely. So as always, we'll put some show notes. We'll get links, contact
[email protected]. So really appreciate your work my friend. I can't wait to have you back. So again, the book is the pulse cure. You can buy it in some. I know we got listeners around the world.
[00:51:55] Speaker B: And you can also go into thepulsecure.com. You will see a video lecture. It's a social network.
So you saw the lecture?
[00:52:05] Speaker A: Yes. Great job.
Before I read the book and it was a great compliment to both.
[00:52:13] Speaker B: So you will get your answer. There's a blog there and everything. So you will get answer and you will meet other people that are doing the same thing. In Norway we have 4000 members, but now we are starting also the international theposphere.com site. So it will be exciting.
[00:52:28] Speaker A: We'll put that in the show notes as well. All right, so thank you so much. Thanks for audience and we'll see you next week. Bye.
